They needed Ashcroft’s signature on a document which would legalize wiretaps. The document was phrased in such a manner as to remove the Executive Branch from oversight by Congress or the Supreme Court.

Ashcroft was deathly sick, and refused, but he didn’t have the powers of Attorney General anyway. They had passed to a deputy, who wouldn’t sign, and the next 6 people in line refused to sign and said they would resign.

Gonzalez finally signed it, but he was White House Counsel and that didn’t carry the weight.

But it was a good run by Bush and Cheney to establish a dictatorship.

The current obsession of the Right with a coup, or a “second amendment solution” in order to “take their country back” is not limited to Conservatives. When Liberal radicals like the Black Panthers or Weatherman started arming themselves and talking revolution it got very scary. Its no different than what’s happening now on the Right with their skinhead militias and bogus minuteman fantasies. ALL rigid ideologies start talking that way when they suspect the country is no longer comfortable with their bullshit.

The Right does have a lot to offer besides just being a counterweight to the Left. Their core ideas, small government, minimum interference with business, low taxes, traditional values, etc, are not bad. They are essential to our form of government and freedom, provided they are not grotesquely distorted the way the current generation of wingnuts has succeeded in doing.

Stopping the excesses of the TP is necessary in the short run, but if you take the long view, we need the tension and conflict of two healthy and principled sides of the political spectrum willing to work together and compromise for the good of the nation. We need moderate Republicans just like we need moderate Democrats. And since no one can come up with an engineering definition for “moderate”, we’re going to have to rely on political debate and compromise to find it. This is how America has always done it, this is how we were designed to work.

The only thing worse than having the TParty take over is for the entire Conservative movement to be replaced by some form of Liberal utopian do-gooder bullshit. I have a feeling that after a while the latter would start sounding and acting a lot like the former.

I hate to sound like a corny old high school Civics teacher, but maybe they got it right after all.

The night of the nomination of Barry Goldwater LBJ received a poll that he would win 70% / 30%. And then Goldwater, instead of nominating a moderate to balance the ticket chose Miller, another hard-core conservative. Johnson won with 62% of the popular vote, all 538 electoral college votes.

One of the sad outcomes of all that is that Johnson did not want to be vulnerable to a “soft on communism” charge, and escalated Vietnam.